Your Words are Wasted - <AUTHOR> http://www.hanselman.com/blog/YourWordsAreWasted.aspx <comment><USER5> So many things one could say. Maybe I'll try to blog some of them. If I can overwhelm my irritation at my blogging software.

Why does paying App.net a bit over four dollars a month make me a member of an elitist "country club", while paying _much more_ than that for my own domain and hosting and backups and uptime monitoring and rapid application of security patches and the talent needed to manage all that makes me a salt-of- the-earth man of the people? Seems like that's only true from a very specific perspective.

I've made too much money setting up other people's blog software to pretend I don't understand why Twitter and Facebook and Tumblr (and even HN, for that matter) are better. People don't want to be publishers. They don't even want to be writers. They want to share things online with their friends.

I see a lot of complaints in this essay about archiving - you can't find old content, you can't save old content. Archiving is overrated. And I say that as someone who loves archives and archivists. It _is_ important to save things, but most writing is not intended for the ages. Quite the opposite: The fact that one can spout some crazy in-jokes to one's friends on Twitter, and in a week from now nobody will be able to find those words, is a _feature_. And the fact that, in truth, Twitter and Facebook are almost certainly quietly archiving all your drunken rants forever, such that twenty years from now your neighbors will be able to pull them right up and show them to their dinner guests for a laugh, is a _terrifying bug_.

Again, most people don't want to be librarians, publishers, journalists, historians, ethnologists, typesetters, designers, promoters, SEO experts, or proud users of a piece of software. And even those of us who _do_ want some of these things enjoy taking a break once in a while. We just want to socialize.

<comment><USER6> The money argument doesn't hold; it's $10/year for a domain name and hosting is free on github pages or heroku.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I really don't get the all or nothing attitude of this article.

I have a blog - and a facebook account and a g+ account. The blog gets my best content. But it's not easy to integrate a standalone blog into an existing social graph (social buttons notwithstanding).

G+ gets my less well thought out rants - short stuff. It allows me to cheaply signal to like minded people and hopefully establish new readers/relationships. I don't care if I offend people on G+ because I'm there to attract the like minded. So I say what I think.

And facebook is just a socialisation wheel greaser for local friendships. Here I'm much more guarded. I use content posted by people as conversation starters for when I see them in real life. I might have to deal with these people - <USER2> I keep it light, fluffy and fun. I personally don't care if facebook deletes all that content. (I see it as a medium risk since facebook isn't a particularly diversified business)

I decided a while ago that I need to engage on all these platforms - <USER3> concentrating solely on a blog only increases your overall isolation to your local life - cause it takes an enormous amount of time - and even your closest local friends aren't likely to even read it.

It might mean that I'll never put enough time into the blog for it be a standalone success. But the odds of that ever happening were slim to nil anyway - even if it did get 100 percent of my time. And there would have been a very high chance that I would have been miserable because such dedication would have led to a high degree of isolation.

This is the right balance for me. I don't expect everyone to have the same view - but then I'm not claiming it's right for everyone.

<comment><USER8> I think we agree with "the blog gets my best content." I'm active (and it works) on all major networks. The tone of the article is intense only because I'll never put my best work on G+ for example, and I was surprised when Yegge did a 6 Yegge long article on G+ rather than his own site, even if he works for Google+.

<comment><USER7> well the title of the article is 'your words are wasted' - which is a bit hyperbolic if you agree with the diversification view. That title - along with the content that follows - seems to imply that it's a waste of time if it isn't going onto your own blog.

Don't get me wrong - I would love for there to be a decentralised social graph that allowed us to eat our cake and have it too. But that aint going to happen any time soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I run blogs on the websites of two businesses I'm associated with. In both cases the intent is not to start a conversation, but to pull in traffic and visitors from Google. Comments are not enabled. I usually base the blog topics on keyword searches that we want to target, and craft posts around that - discussing the topic and tying the business to that topic.

For static websites, even eCommerce websites, it's a great and effective way to add fresh content and pages to a site, and push up its rankings.

I'm a fast writer - easily able to produce a 600 word post in 20 minutes - <USER4> I write prose that is easy to read. The strategy works - on a robot level (Google), and on a human level (customers), but it takes time and persistence. It may take 6 months for a series of posts to cause a category page to rank in the top 3 of Google - in some cases longer.

It's also a strategy that many competitors cannot duplicate, as most are unable to write regular, meaningful blog posts. It's one of those SEO tactics that requires actual, real work, which is why so few do it well.

Wordpress, with a custom theme that fits in seamlessly with the website, is the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER10> I prefer a domain and my own server. But nobody will see what I write. The _average_ user can't use G Reader. They can use twitter and facebook. Why hasn't this issue been solved? I want a network with friends who are users that gives me control. Contradiction in terms?

<comment><USER11> It's simple really. Whenever I write a blog post, I post a link on my facebook page. I get pretty decent click-through rates. And at the same time, the post is there for the rest of the web too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Your words are most likely wasted on a blog too. If the choices are social network or blog, we're kind of screwed. I used to read paper magazine articles because they were interesting to read. I bought a magazine and read it like a book, like a collection of stories. There is almost nothing that comes close to that experience online. Some forums, maybe, but that's it. Nowadays you have to scan through several hundred items to find one interesting article to read, and even that will be short, time-sensitive and optimized for skimming rather than reading.

<comment><USER13> Also optimized for self-promotion, which is targeted at a certain minority that I am and probably will never be a part of, such as employers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I could not agree more with Scott. I still have the hardest time trying to convince people to start a blog. "I don't have time to blog" "I don't know what I'd write about".. yet they end up posting lots of content casually on various social networks/forums.

Perhaps blogging tools need to adapt to more short form uses and have posting interfaces that seem more accommodating rather than a massive empty textarea with tons of options from slug to categories and tags.

The WordPress Prologue/P2 themes comes to mind.

<comment><USER15> I think both of those objections only partially convey their real meaning.

"I don't have time to blog" = "The time it would take me to blog is worth more to me than the ROI I'd get from writing a blog."

and "I don't know what I'd write about" = "I don't know who'd be reading my blog so as to make it easy to know what to write about."

Facebook and Twitter address both objections by giving users a well-defined, sometimes really big audience.

The idea of writing stuff they think no one's going to read isn't very appetizing to most people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Since the discussion is fragmented between the blog comments and here, I'm posting my comment on his blog here too.

I recently started blogging and my first blog post about why I blog has exactly the same reasons - control over content and flexibility.

I've been posting for a month and a half, two posts a week on average, and now I'm starting to get discouraged - it's not that I don't like the blog it just that it got zero traction outside my circle of techie friends. I launched a small Trello app at the same time and even though both got zero marketing the app is about 3 times more popular by views and tens of times more popular by users (granted it is still only hundreds of views and tens of users).

What has discouraged me the most is that even when I put myself out there and posted something relevant and interesting (IMHO) on Hacker News I got exactly 1 vote and no comments. It's not even that it is bad, it's ignored.

I know that a month is not something substantial and if I continue to create interesting content people will eventually come (with some marketing). I just want to have a counter-point that a blog is not just writing text on your on domain - you have to market it and even than people might not care, just like any other product.

<shameless_promotion>

<http://sveder.com/blog>

</shameless_promotion>

<comment><USER17> _I've been posting for a month and a half, two posts a week on average, and now I'm starting to get discouraged_

Would it be possible for you to blog not for the traction, but for the sake of blogging?

I think my blog was closed to everyone but me for the first couple of years I was posting - I just did not want my employer to stumble upon it by random chance, I had no idea what the reaction could be. But I found out that it was still useful - a number of times, when I had to remember something about the way I solved some particular problem, I searched my own blog and found it.

Now it's almost a habit - whenever I do something even remotely interesting, it pops into my head - wait, I could write a short blog post about it in 10-15 minutes. So I do.

<comment><USER16> It's a balance. I post for myself but I would like feedback on it and to learn from it. There is a huge difference between the documentation and personal knowledge base I have on my personal OneNote notebooks and the public blog - it takes me a few hours for each blog post. I add pictures, format, spell and grammar check since English is not my mother tongue etc. If I see I don't get any benefit from all this polish I will be discouraged from doing it and will just keep it in its raw stream-of-thought form for personal use.

<comment><USER8> I blogged in a vacuum for almost two years without an audience. An audience has shown up since then but I continue to blog for me. Just being able to google for my thoughts the years later makes it worth it.

<comment><USER16> Well I'm preparing myself for that, but as I said, this means that getting actual apps out there will still be a priority for me over blogging, or the blog's quality will suffer.

I'm kinda interested at why you chose to reply to the thread here instead of the same comment posted in your blog? I feel that the discussion here is of higher quality (whatever that means), but the blog is, as you advocate, your own space. I've seen some blogs without comments and all the discussion is happening on Hacker News or Reddit, so I'd like to hear your thoughts about it.

<comment><USER8> Well, in a perfect world we'd have a single "place" to go that would aggregate content AND comments. That was the promise of clients like FeedDemon and RSS for Comments. However, Google Reader doesn't support comments and as such, that died.

I worry about things like Disqus as well as they are just another place to put our content. It looks like it's on our site but it's not. They WILL die one day and then what happens to the comments?

For now, I go where the discussion is but I'd prefer to own both.

<comment><USER16> Just a brainstorm here, but would some kind of Disqus like ui that aggregates comments from HN, reddit and blog comment feed would be an interesting product?

(Google search shows two such apps - one has shutdown and one is now a casino site... Maybe it's just not profitable.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> But all the _people_ are in those "walled gardens," and if you're not trying to create a permanent archive of your words for the ages, it makes more sense to chose the platform that makes it easier to interact with an audience, rather than one that preserves everything you write forever.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's intriguing hear Scott echo RMS. Although Scott limits his argument to the consequences of relying on corporations for services, a similar argument can be made regarding the behavior of governments (domain name seizures, for example).

I'd be interested in hearing where/how he draws the line.

</comment><comment><USER20> One obstacle, in my eyes, is that some of the best blogging software out there is provided in a Software-as-a-Service model. This is, of course, less of a headache for the original developers—they have a guaranteed long-term income (rather than one-off license fees), and they don't have to worry about portability or varying server specs. The result is that now, if a person wants to run his/her own blog and have total control over the content, s/he will need to write the software for it. I personally wouldn't mind paying several hundred dollars for a piece of really good blogging software.

N.B.: I looked into Wordpress et al., but I always avoid using software written in PHP if I can, and theming in Wordpress involves more time than I have to spare.

<comment><USER8> But one could go to Amazon or Azure or Herok and install Wordpress in 20 minutes from start to finish and OWN it...if this process could include domain names and take just 2 minutes...

<comment><USER21> <http://iwantmyname.com/> lets you do it in ~2minutes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> "Own your space on the Web, and pay for it."

"You want control? Buy a domain and blog there. "

And at the very least if you don't want to pay or setup your own hosting site (and want to go the free route) at least register your own domain and have it pointed by cname or web forwarding to any of the free hosting providers out there. (Making sure to keep a backup of course).

Of course since true web hosting can be had very cheaply today (this isn't 1996) there really isn't any reason to just not setup your own site. If you are going to take the time to write something you can spend .50 per day (or less) on web hosting. What's your time worth?

</comment><comment><USER23> in addition to that, all the big players KNOW that, like google, facebook etc. we wrote a paper about nosql-thingies... they're developed EXACTLY for this usage scenario - just store temporary non-over-the-ages-important data on some cheap maschines... if the data is lost, okay, the data is lost - shit on acid, shit on persistency, shit on consistency, but all the "un-interesting data" should be served fast -- this was the DoB of nosql.

can YOU imagine, that any big newspaper or library will store the (maybe) really important things on this systems - or ANYTHING else outside the blog- sharosphere? (sharophere should get the right buzzword for this activism) no... not really...

imho and like "mechanical_fish" mentioned, all people think, that their data, blog-entries, pictures or even JOKES are so important (funny/cool/needed), that should be shared all over the world... i'm not an anti-share-man in contrast to that, i REALLY use twitter, facebook etc., but the "hype" on blogging is too much for me.

let me clarify this a little bit and maybe from a technical point of view: in the last years, since ANYBODY thinks, that their mini-uncomplicated solution for $this problem in $that language that this should be shared, because it's "really important", the web is full of trash and blog-entries, where the question is searched an answer to, is just rewritten, WITHOUT an answer. any of you should now the problem, that you REALLY have to investigate now, to get a solution for a more complex problem or EVEN an academic paper/research- website... the web is full of junk and i'm not feeling lucky about that.

what do you mean?

</comment><comment><USER24> Isn't it ironic that we discuss the article here and not on Scott's blog?

<comment><USER25> Isn't it ironic that anyone discusses it on Scott's blog and not on their own blog?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> argument saying that your post might dissapear is wrong. how long will you host your blog when you're not feeling like writing blogposts anymore?

<comment><USER8> Why would I stop running a website? It's a cheap VPS that I use for lots of things. No reason for it to go away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think this bit from an older article sums it up nicely:

[http://www.the-haystack.com/2010/12/17/death-to-web- services...](http://www.the-haystack.com/2010/12/17/death-to-web-services- long-live-web-services/)

 _What if we flipped this all on its head? What if we hosted our own data, and provided APIs for all these webapps so that they can use our data? I can imagine that to be a substantially cool use of RDFa/Microformats and whatever metadata/semantic web technologies you prefer. Isn't one of the points of the semantic web to make decentralized information meaningful, retrievable and mixable?

So instead of having our own websites aggregate our own data from other people's websites, we'll let other people use the data from our own websites. Photos, meaningfully tagged, can be pulled in by Flickr via our own personal API, if you will. We provide the structured data, Flickr provides the functionality. The sharing. The social. Why not?

Personal publishing platforms like WordPress, Drupal, [your favorite here] could be extended to make use of microformatting, RDF, etc. and provide tools for syndication, as we now do with simple blogposts. Services don't need to host our data. They only need to do cool things with it._

<comment><USER8> I love this. Exactly. There's no reason we can't do this other than the will to do it. The social web could be open and distributed and web-like while still _looking_ centralized like twitter.

<comment><USER28> It seems that you are disregarding the vast majority of Facebook/Google+/whatever users -- who _still_ don't know how to, or don't want to setup their own domain and manage blogging software. Yet, they also want to have a place to put their voice out there.

A system like the one that GP proposes, while it could be pretty awesome, would be limited to a very small, extremely homogenous population. It's not hard to see why Facebook beats that.

<comment><USER8> I would argue that it could be made possible to allow folks to get domains, hosting and software that they control as easily as buying a toy on Amazon. Domains, DNS and hosting setup doesn't need to be hard - it's hard because no one has tried to change it.

<comment><USER28> I have to disagree. Dreamhost makes it very simple to register a domain and have WP installed. Wordpress.com makes it simpler still. How much simpler does it need to be?

Everyone knows what WordPress is, I think people who entertain the idea of publishing are aware of their options now. The draw of social networks is that there is a low friction process -- facilitated by an interested party -- which makes it very easy to go from ideation to publication. Until very recent versions of WP, it was a pain in the ass (from a regular user's perspective) to simply post a set of pictures along with some thoughts.

If we look at your set of questions, something like e.g. Facebook provides answers to all of them which are, yes unsatisfying, but the trade off is a low-effort process.

EDIT: Also, out of curiosity what do you use to host your site, and how/why did you choose it?

<comment><USER8> Well, arguably it has to be as easy (and hip and fun and attractive) as signing up for Twitter.

<comment><USER29> Easier but yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Blogging is dead.

I ran a fairly successful blog (front paged here a number of times). I recently cut the cord and abandoned it. The blogging tail is getting shorter and shorter as more and more people move to the closed and walled gardens.

I shut it down because it was the _illusion_ of accomplishment: every time I got a hit entry I would assure myself that I've moved forward in some way, achieved something, etc. Whenever I thought about doing something actually beneficial, the easiest procrastination was to just go do a blog post instead, imagining that every hit actually meant something. That I was somehow accumulating assets in something worthwhile.

It achieves nothing, at least if you're already established. If you're new to the industry and unproven then it's a good way of trying to fake it before you make it, but if you're professionally grounded, it's a liability as much as a benefit.

Worse there is a tendency for readership to start to control what you write about, which is one reason I moved to more free-form content on a walled garden: I'll write about a caterpillar in the yard, my new lawn tractor, and some new development in Android, all because I no longer fool myself into thinking the blog is a business. It's just some random thoughts, whether read or not.

The time spent writing it -- even if you're pretty successful at it -- would almost always be better spent on other endeavours. To bring up some examples oft cited on here, John Gruber is one of the most successful bloggers, as is Marco Arment. They're reduced to trying to pitch t-shirts and affiliate links. Neither of them -- despite volumes of words spilled onto epaper -- change anything in the industry through their respective blogs. A lot of words evaporating into the ether, the converted incited into a chorus of the echo chamber.</comment>


Why do we use C still? - <AUTHOR> Why do we use C still when there are other languages like Go or C++ or even D? BCPL and B were done away with so quickly, so why do we still use C in our modern society with languages that can do things a lot more efficiently? <comment><USER2> Some reasons:

1\. Everyone has a C compiler, or can write a decent-enough one to support their preferred environment.

2\. C is well tested and specified. Reading the standard isn't an exercise is face melting (compare with, say, C++).

3\. As a systems language, C doesn't require a runtime library if not needed, and this can be left out very easily (not the case with Go, D, or C++, as I'm aware).

4\. C exposes easy trapdoors to the underlying machine (inline assembly, pointers, etc.) that are very handy.

5\. C is usable by other languages, as its calling conventions are well documented. This is why C is a preferred base language for things like OpenGL bindings--it's easy to write Ruby, Pyhton, Java, etc. wrappers. This is in sharp contrast to C++, which is brainfucked for things like symbol exports.

6\. A line of C is pretty obvious in what it does, when written correctly. You can usually estimate what code it'll generate, barring #define hackery. C++ especially is bad at this.

~

C is still used because it doesn't do a lot, and it nails what it does do.

</comment><comment><USER3> C is an adequate language (actually, more than adequate) with a large base of skilled programmers. There is a long history of successful development. And the developer base is aware of the warts that still remain in the language.

<comment><AUTHOR> But why use C when there are other Systems programming languages like Go, C++, D, etc..

<comment><USER4> One reason would be the massive existing codebases written in C (Linux kernel, anyone?)...

<comment><USER5> We should all switch to Java/C#. It makes programming much much faster and easier. <http://techiest.blogspot.com/>.

<comment><USER6> I work on embedded microcontrollers that have, at the _most_ , 16K of code space and 512 bytes of RAM. I have a nice efficient optimizing C compiler that creates object code nearly as tight as the local assembly language.

Do you think I would benefit from Java? Because I don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The only way to do elegant programming is with C. C is as perfect as programming languages can get. The other languages that you named are just more flawed than C. That's why.

<comment><USER8> Ah yes, I'm sure the Go designers in particular are ignorant about the pros and cons of C </s>

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Generally, the good reasons you'll see for using C are lack of C++ compiler availability and embedded programming.

The bad reasons tend to be variations of developer inertia and the inability to decide which features of C++ ought to be used -- arguing against the STL isn't a good argument against C++ as a whole.

<comment><AUTHOR> On Linux/Mac you have g++ and on Windows you have MinGW/Visual Studio

<comment><USER9> There are many more operating systems out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> C is currently the language I know best. I may therefore be biased. There are multiple reasons why C is useful for system programming. Legacy code as others have said. A huge community for support and maturity in tools. The fact that C is very close to the bare metal of the system, which means that problems with your code like memory leaks are most likely the programmer's fault , and can thus be fixed by the programmer. It also isn't proprietary in any way. There is no for profit company that controls the language.

C has disadvantages. But many of them are the result of its advantages. Automated garbage collection is great, but garbage collection by hand tuning code gets stuff that AGC may miss.

That said, I'm interested in picking up some of the other languages mentioned.

</comment><comment><USER11> I use C as a language of last resort, as a sort of universal assembly language. If I get a problem to the point that I know exactly what I want the machine to do, but can't convince Haskell or Python or Java to do it and don't have the time to research a proper solution, I can knock something out in C that will be as fast as the machine can reasonably be expected to go. It erases all of the questions about whether the compiler is doing something mysterious to sabotage you.

</comment><comment><USER12> Because the Go compiler doesn't optimize good enough yet?

It seems like the one language that might replace C/C++ in many instances. My favorite feature is the incredible compile times.

<http://golang.org/>

<comment><USER13> Ironically, your favorite feature is also your least favorite feature: The compiler is relatively simple and unambitious, resulting in fantastic compile times. Once you start doing advanced analysis and multiple passes, you suddenly aren't so speedy anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Just search for 'C++ for kernel' on google. There are plenty of reasons. A good answer can be found here: <http://stackoverflow.com/a/520355>

</comment><comment><USER15> We have discussed this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3721142>

</comment><comment><USER16> because C is perfection

<comment><USER17> Nope, Java/C# is PERFECTION. <http://techiest.blogspot.com/>.</comment></comment>


Expert Confirms Authenticity Of Vinland Map - <AUTHOR> http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1722913/expert_confirms_authenticity_of_vinland_map/index.html

<comment><USER2> Except that their "expert" is completely wrong.

A simple trip to Wikipedia would show that he knows nothing. It's really bad when Wikipedia knows more about your field than you do. There have been several studies proving that the map is a forgery.

The problem is that most people don't understand the scientific method. With the scientific method, you take a hypothesis (that the map is authentic) and then you try to find evidence disproving it. Once you have found evidence disproving the hypothesis, it doesn't matter how good a forgery it is, it's still a forgery.

For real scientific analysis:

<http://vinland-map.brandeis.edu/explore/material/clark.php>

<http://vinland-map.brandeis.edu/explore/material/mccrone.php>

<http://vinland-map.brandeis.edu/explore/material/cahill.php>

Sure, there are things that point to it being authentic, but it isn't. If you're accused of murder, you had a grudge against the guy, people heard you say you'd kill him, and you bought a gun that day, that's all evidence that you might have killed him. But if a group of people all saw you at the time of the murder, then you didn't kill him no matter how compelling that other evidence is - in science, a single disproving fact invalidates supporting evidence because that's what truth is.

<comment><USER3> _Sure, there are things that point to it being authentic, but it isn't._

Speaking of ignorance of the scientific method...

Look, this is what science is about. It's an accomplishment of multiplicitous scepticism over time. Imagine if people had harbored the same iron-clad certainty as to the completeness of Newtonian physics over Einsteinian. They'd probably say something along the lines of, "Sure, there are things that point to space-time distortion around heavy bodies, but that's not the case." And if they were feeling particularly sinister, they'd follow up with, "Look at the wikipedia entry for the facts."

Many things once held to be true are revolutionized by advances in technology. There is absolutely no reason to question the rigour and knowledge with which the Danish expert approached this study. A cursory look (which we seem so fond of today) at his credentials reveals a man of some experience: <http://www.kons.dk/dk/site.aspx?p=176>

Science is objective scepticism over many, many cycles. It's not a cursory look at a wikipedia page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The way they draw wiggly lines around the coast - is that supposed to be geographically correct? Or is it just shorthand for "beware: coast is wiggly"?

<comment><USER5> I think the artist was implying accuracy that he probably couldn't vouch for.

So it's supposed to be geographically correct, but the advanced reader can take it as shorthand for wiggly coast.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Considering open sourcing our landing page.  Any interest? - <AUTHOR> http://www.thetileapp.com

<comment><USER2> This looks like a transparent grab for hacker news traffic.

It even has all of the Hacker News Bingo spots: launch page, "open source", "Show HN", socialsocialsocial...

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi ketralnis, thanks for replying. What do you mean Bingo spots?

Anyway, would love you feedback on the page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Hmmm... what? Here's what I see when I click your link:

<http://i.imgur.com/Ej18Sap.png>

Is my browser not rendering something? No info about the product, a simple formfield with a "OK" button in a simplistic style?

Sure, open source it if you want. What does that entail, besides posting 1 HTML/CSS/JS file? Usually people open-source large projects that solve a very precise need that can be easily re-used by others. Sure, sign-in pages are a common "problem", but they're practically the "Hello world" of web development. Would one post on HN to ask if they should release their "Hello world!" program? (even if it has scrolling characters with nice ncurses rendering!)

I'm thoroughly confused here. :/

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Guia, nope that is rendering correctly. What we've build is simple, but more than what you've seen so far. It's a page for collecting email addresses and showing how many people have signed up ahead of you and behind you. It also allows you to immediately skip ahead in line by sharing on Facebook and Twitter, something we haven't seen before on other pages like this.

Nope, there is not info on the actual product we are building yet accept for the email that is sent out when you sign up. We wanted to keep some mystery, but based on others' comments it sounds like we should be give at least some info about the product.

<comment><USER4> The social sharing to move in a queue has been used many times before. Sites like betali.st and erlibrid showcase this.

I believe launchrock and similar companies specialise in these kinds of things. Open sourcing may be a good move, but many others employ existing systems with similar functionality (although they may not be open).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This will only be on our page for so long, but we want it to live on! If people do like this we will put in the work to open source it so others can use it.

A couple features different from LaunchRock:

-Shows how many people have already signed up ahead of you and behind you

-Allows you to jump ahead of people by sharing this on Facebook or Twitter

<comment><USER5> I'd love for this to be open-source, with attribution back to you all, its awesome

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Another app was posted here recently: <http://betaq.co>

I do like the concept.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh wow, similar ideas! Thanks for posting t0

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's pretty annoying to make somebody 1) give an email address to find more info then 2) dont give them the info that you just promised. I guess you mean signup for our mailing list so you can get info later, but that wasn't clear.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, ok thanks Ryderm. If this wasn't clear, then this should be fixed. Regarding getting more info about what we are actually working on, check your inbox. However, we should fix the language if that's the sense you got. If people are annoyed, the last thing they are going to do is share it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Unsolicited Feedback: You need to provide some visual feedback when the button is clicked. Not all your users are running on fibre.

I clicked it a few times because I wasn't sure it was registering my clicks.

3G is sloooow.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, good to know. Thanks markdown

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would love to see how it was built. I'm quite new to web development, and I recently built my first sign up page, but have always wanted to learn how to build the nice animations that show up on many sign up pages.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Danny, James on our team does the front end, but my understanding is that it's all javascript.</comment></comment>


Reason as memetic immune disorder - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/18b/reason_as_memetic_immune_disorder/

<comment><USER2> Very interesting threads of thought in this essay. The idea of culture as an evolved complex, similar to an ecosystem in some ways and similar to an organism in others is a strong one.

Like an ecosystem, there is a certain equilibria that uses both rational and non rational elements to maintain. Some of the elements are downright irrational. There is a brilliant representation of this by Douglas Adams that I often quote. The whole thing is definitely worth a read if you enjoyed this essay. It is really a different way of looking at the same thing. I'll paste some pieces of it here:

 _..The one I have in mind at the moment is one that describes the culture and economy of Bali, which is a small, very crowded island that subsists on rice. Now, rice is an incredibly efficient food and you can grow an awful lot in a relatively small space, but it's hugely labour intensive and requires a lot of very, very precise co-operation amongst the people there, particularly when you have a large population on a small island needing to bring its harvest in. People now looking at the way in which rice agriculture works in Bali are rather puzzled by it because it is intensely religious. The society of Bali is such that religion permeates every single aspect of it and everybody in that culture is very, very carefully defined in terms of who they are, what their status is and what their role in life is. It's all defined by the church; they have very peculiar calendars and a very peculiar set of customs and rituals, which are precisely defined and, oddly enough, they are fantastically good at being very, very productive with their rice harvest. In the 70s, people came in and noticed that the rice harvest was determined by the temple calendar. It seemed to be totally nonsensical, so they said, 'Get rid of all this, we can help you make your rice harvest much, much more productive than even you're, very successfully, doing at the moment. Use these pesticides, use this calendar, do this, that and the other'. So they started and for two or three years the rice production went up enormously, but the whole predator/prey/pest balance went completely out of kilter. Very shortly, the rice harvest plummeted again and the Balinese said, 'Screw it, we're going back to the temple calendar!' and they reinstated what was there before and it all worked again absolutely perfectly. It's all very well to say that basing the rice harvest on something as irrational and meaningless as a religion is stupid - they should be able to work it out more logically than that, but they might just as well say to us, 'Your culture and society works on the basis of money and that's a fiction, so why don't you get rid of it and just co-operate with each other' - we know it's not going to work!..

..this bit of engineering practice and that bit of architectural practice; you don't really know what to make of them. Compare that to somebody who tosses a cricket ball at you. You can sit and watch it and say, 'It's going at 17 degrees'..

..instead of going through all the business of trying to work out the angles and trying to digest which genuine architectural principles you may want to take out of what may be a passing architectural fad, just ask yourself, 'how would a dragon live here?' We are used to thinking in terms of organic creatures; an organic creature may consist of an enormous complexity of all sorts of different variables that are beyond our ability to resolve but we know how organic creatures live. We've never seen a dragon but we've all got an idea of what a dragon is like, so we can say, 'Well if a dragon went through here, he'd get stuck just here and a little bit cross over there because he couldn't see that and he'd wave his tail and knock that vase over'. You figure out how the dragon's going to be happy here and lo and behold! you've suddenly got a place that makes sense for other organic creatures, such as ourselves, to live in._

<http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/>

</comment><comment><USER3> "To paraphrase Steve Weinberg, 'For a smart person to do something truly stupid, they need a theory.' Actually, I could have quoted him directly--'stupid' is just a lighter shade of 'evil.' Communism and fascism both begin by exercising complete control over the memetic environment, in order to create a new man stripped of cultural immunity, who will do whatever they tell him to.)"

That's an interesting idea. There is considerable research support

[http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...](http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300123852)

for the idea that people can be smart in the IQ test sense and just end up using their smartness to elaborate and make more rigid ideas that are just plain wrong.

<http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805070893/>

So reason has to be checked both substantively and procedurally to offer improvement in human thinking. Reasoning from irrational premises can often result in tightly developed delusions rather than better recognition of reality.

</comment><comment><USER4> Have any religious people here read this article? What did you think?

<comment><USER5> I was raised Christian. Around the end of college, I had a bit of a quarter- life crisis, and I ended up applying reason to my religion in the way talked about in this article. I joined a Christian missionary organization, and was determined to "go therefore in to all the world and preach the gospel to all nations", one of the typically semi-ignored Christian commands.

I was also convinced that it would be a good idea to prove that the key disputed points of Christianity were in fact correct. I went on skepticsannotatedbible.com and the Atheism sub-reddit and compiled a list of arguments to refute. I couldn't refute enough of them, and so found myself in a conundrum. I ended up choosing to live in the real world.

Most of my close friends, however, are still from the Christian communities I used to frequent. I prod and poke them mentally a little bit. Its amazing to me how Christians can justify almost anything, as long as their community mostly agrees with them. I have a group of friends who go to church multiple times per week, and have no problems sleeping with their boy/girlfriends. I have gay Christian friends, Christian friends who are bartenders, etc. My parents would be livid.

Anyhow, I just wanted to point out that when I think back about my life so far, the part of it that scares me, was when I took my religion and decided that I had to take it seriously and _do something_.

<comment><USER2> I have come across gay men from Orthodox Jewish backgrounds. Since secular or even atheist Jews are a perfectly possible thing to be, they can have an identity as Gay & Jewish. Most go that path. But some seem to want exactly what this article is talking about to be developed. They want some smart rabbis to come up with some smart reasons around the contradiction.

The Jewish tradition doesn't really emphasise a rule against homosexuality as much as many think. Many of the much more explicit rules (eg. If your brother dies, you get his wife) have ways around them or are ignored. They are sort of vaguely interested in the how and have this sort of instinctive understanding that it's possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The idea of ideas as viruses is old. They can infect you, then can breed with other ideas, they spread, etc.

Religion world wide does seem to follow a pattern of more complicated and more energy demanding religions being replaced by religions which require less effort. One god instead of many, and lately that god doesn't even want sacrifices, oh and peace is better then war... most of the time.

Obviously it not that simple, religion can spread through war, some religions make themselves extinct by demanding life long celibacy from everyone. And there's been some studies which found the _us vs them_ pattern common in religious groups can decrease and/or slow the spread of disease.

There's one particular thing about Christianity though. Well OK, a couple of things, one it's kind of a modern less complex flavor of Judaism, no offense meant to any Hebrews reading this.

But the other thing is Christ's rather extreme _love your enemies, turn the other cheek_ message. You have to see that in the context of the Roman empire and Roman culture at the time.

Rome was EXTREMELY pro war, violence and punishment. Think crucifixion, gladiators, pax romana etc. But even more then that, Roman culture saw mercy as a dirty animalistic emotion, to be surprised like all animalsitic and primitive urges should be. Reason was human, emotions, especially mercy were disgusting instincts not to be trusted, but to be fought against, with reason.

In short it was an extreme culture, that must have put some unique psychological pressures on those living there. Think how people in Japan who remember the end of WWII describe how the emperor announcing Japan's surrender felt like a bow breaking and huge pressure being relieved.

Christianity is like the perfect counter culture to the old Roman culture. No wonder it successfully spread throughout the empire. And from Rome to all of Europe, to the new world.

The other parts of the old world, have not turned Christian, and it's not for lack of trying by well funded Christian missionaries, suggesting there really was something unique about Rome and early Christianity.

Modern American Christianity is often quite, shall we say unique, why with the pro Gun, pro war thing.

<comment><USER7>
      There's one particular thing about Christianity though.
      Well OK, a couple of things, one it's kind of a modern
      less complex flavor of Judaism, no offense meant to any
      Hebrews reading this.

First, the similarity between the practice of Judaism and Christianity is the product of the last century or so. At the time, the ideas of, e.g., Paul diverged significantly from contemporary Jewish thinking.

Second, if you don't want to offend Jews, don't call them "Hebrews". ;)

<comment><USER2> Why, not? It's archaic and not strictly a synonym, but why would it be offensive. I understand that those that use it, usually mean offense, but there is no real reason for it.

In lots of languages it is not derogatory.

<comment><USER8> Equating a religious group with an ethnic one is mistaken (like saying 'Arabs when 'Muslims is meant), regardless of whether anyone is offended.

<comment><USER2> Thinking of those two things as distinct concepts with clear borders is a mistake. Both religious and ethnic group do not usually have definite boundaries and they are not always seperate from each other. Saying Arabs when you mean Muslim is what you mean is indeed a mistake. Most Muslims are not Arabs, but that proves nothing about how to classify these things.

Hebrews is a different issue. Jewish is actually Judah-ite, from the tribe of Judah. These were (according to the tradition) the surviving tribe of the Israelites or People of Israel. People is actually a bit misleading. In Hebrew it uses the word normally translated as 'Nation'. In modern times, the relationship between Judah & Jewish has been blurred since some groups trace their heritage to other (lost) tribes.

In any case, all of these equally refer to an ethnic group though you could argue that they are not exact synonyms. This is not just about the origin of the words. It is also the religious tradition. Jewish is not a Religion in the sense that Islam or Christianity are. It are not something you chose. It is not something you can stop and it is not something that anybody who is not (ethnically) Jewish is required or encouraged to join. Basically, the "religion" as you would probably call it doesn't distinguish between religion and ethnic group. The members of this ethnic-religious do not usually do so either. That is, many secular, atheist Jews describe themselves as Jewish, and behave in someway that indicates this.

Hebrews & Israelites, People of Israel, are as far a I know, used interchangeably in the old testament. In modern Hebrew all but the most pedantic (and religious) will use Israelites interchangeably with Jews. Secular Jews are unlikely to say Jews. "Hebrews" is not really used in modern Hebrew unless making some sort of biblical reference. In some languages it has a derogatory ring but in some languages describing someone as a Jew/Hebrew/Israelite is derogatory regardless of the word you use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe it is possible for lesswrong to be less wrong after all.</comment>


Rate our pivot : PythonAnywhere - <AUTHOR>

We recently posted a 'Rate our Pivot', for Project Dirigible, our Python-based spreadsheet web-application. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2304691)
We received some great responses and excellent advice. The thing that people found the most interesting was the 'effortless cloud supercomputing' aspect, while being least engaged by the spreadsheet-UI.
So we trimmed the application to provide something more focused. The result is PythonAnywhere - a interactive Python console in the browser, that runs your code on our servers.
http://pythonanywhere.com
The user's code runs in a sandbox, to guard against griefers.
We're not tied to Python - in a later version, the server-side process could be anything, from Ruby to a Bash shell.
Casual use is free, like Dropbox, and we would charge for more resource-intensive services, maybe access to networking, or for access to substantial CPU time or disk space.
Prospective users have requested:
- Persistent sessions, so you can close your session but then pick it up from another device later on, with screen content, command-line history, and Python context intact.
- Server-side storage / Integration with Dropbox or Github or other DVCS hosts.
- Shared console sessions, so two or more users can work in the same session, maybe for tutoring, or possibly for remote pairing.
- Providing many different Python versions, all loaded with packages from PyPI, so users could try things out without any local install or config.
- Providing a grid computing API, to run users' code across several of our EC2 instances.
- An editor.
We've just gone live today with a limited private beta, in which multiple users can share persistent sessions.
We'd appreciate any feedback at all, but we're particularly interested in:
- Features that would make it useful to you.
- Features that you would pay for.
- How well we're presenting our case.
Any thoughts would be much appreciated -- thanks in advance! <comment><USER2> I think the idea is certainly neat. I guess it's very useful if you need a lot of bandwidth/CPU power when working from a mobile device.

So the idea is that you provide grid computing support from Python and an in- the-cloud IDE? Like a "matlab in the cloud"?

In that case, a very important feature would be chart drawing support, and ways to import/export data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey. Thanks for the comment. Yep. Right now the beta only works on regular OS & browsers, and on the Nokia N900, but we still have some work to do on Android, and have yet to test on iOS, but theoretically we have no known incompatible tech.

We hadn't thought about chart drawing, but it seems to make good sense. Thanks!

We're constantly brainstorming about the best ways to import and export source and data. We're currently thinking about Dropbox or Github integration, or maybe a very lightweight client-end component which simply allows you to sync the current directory to your PythonAnywhere server-side storage.

<comment><USER3> Chart drawing is useful (if only for visually exploring the data). I wouldn't be willing to be tied to your service, so you may want to integrate some standard library?

A chroot-like system would work fine, and also make it easy to export data.

This also needs a live demo. And have you already figured out how to make the Python interpreter persist across reboots?

<comment><USER4> Right, we're definitely intending to avoid tying people in as much as possible. matplotlib might be a good choice, perhaps?

PythonAnywhere currently runs in a chroot jail, and we're thinking that we should have a simple URL scheme for accessing files in your private store -- so that, for example, if you're logged in, you could access stuff using something like <http://pythonanywhere.com/user/your-id/path/to/your/file>. Of course, Dropbox is likely to be more convenient a lot of the time. But we don't want to rely on them entirely.

Re: the live demo -- definitely, once we're in beta we'll put a console on the front page of the site, and signing up for a free account will be really easy.

Making the interpreter persist across reboots (especially with eg. DB connection variables intact) is definitely going to be tricky. We've got ideas, but nothing working yet.

<comment><USER2> I agree with the the grandparent that preventing lock-in is important, but I think in addition to the standard you _do_ want to offer some APIs in your service that are specific to the environment you are in (cloud, HTML5). Kind of like AppEngine with their native datastore and Amazon with EBS.

<comment><USER4> That's an interesting point. I guess the distinction we want to make is between creating private APIs that would lock people in, and enabling them to use appropriate standards and publicly-available modules. So integrating with (say) WebGL for graphics, or making it easy for people to mount their own EBS volumes or access S3 (we're running on AWS anyway) would be good, whereas insisting that the only way to display plots of data was to call our private API would be bad.

Does that make sense?

<comment><USER2> Yes, exactly. I think it makes sense to use standard modules if possible, but use private APIs for functionality that is not in the standard Python.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> easy to click: <http://pythonanywhere.com>

<comment><USER4> Thanks! If anyone could tell us how to make clickable links in ask-HN-style posts, we'd be eternally grateful :-)

<comment><USER3> It's impossible, so there's usually a comment like this.

<comment><USER4> Ah, I see.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


4 min Emacs screencast inspired by Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle - <AUTHOR> http://emacsrocks.com/e11.html?

<comment><USER3> Awesome!! That guy is steadily doing some amazing publicity for emacs.

This is a "live" video he did, slightly longer at 18 minutes, but with lots of javascript refactoring, etc: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3Te_a-AGqM>

<comment><USER4> This was done as a lightning talk the night before the Web Rebels conference in Oslo in May. I was there, and Magnar completely killed it. Awesome stuff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A note for the author regarding Dropbox's "uncool" headers: Adding `?dl=1` to the Dropbox link will automatically prompt users to download the file upon clicking, and save you from having to write the disclaimer asking users to right-click and "Save As..."

<comment><AUTHOR> Ooh, very nice. I'll fix that straight away. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, that is awesome!

I think it would be cool to combine it with a small JavaScript library that could make things like the transformation between animation and just drawing a path automatic. I doubt this would be _too_ difficult, and it would make going between them much easier if you didn't have to change your code significantly.

There is no question that I'm using Swank-js for all my web development now!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, that would be pretty cool. I'll be making something along those lines to aid me while I'm making that bouncy ball into an actual game. I wouldn't know how to start making it general purpose, but as a wrapper around canvas and requestAnimationFrame it is definitely doable.

<comment><USER6> Well, I doubt you could make it arbitrarily general-purpose.

I was thinking about maybe building on top of some existing framework. I think there are various existing libraries that help you create shapes and animate them; I imagine you could make something very useful by hooking onto the various methods in a library like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is some amazing stuff. As a fan of emacs, but having no experience with javascript, I would like to be able to recreate this personally, and possibly use this as my training ground. I know the purpose of the post is to show a short video of something impressive, but could you consider providing the code samples and maybe even a guide of the code?

Regardless of whether you can or not, it truly is some amazingly impressive work. Thanks for sharing!

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote a little bit about installing swank-js a couple of posts up. You can also check out all my emacs-settings on github [https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d/blob/master/setup- slime-...](https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d/blob/master/setup-slime-js.el)

The only thing missing there is the packages installed through package.el, which would be slime-js in this case.

And here's the code for the bouncing ball: <https://github.com/magnars/blockout>

<comment><USER8> Cool, but how about the rest of the code, for the "game"?

<comment><AUTHOR> That last link there is all there is of the "game" for now. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been a vim user since I was ten years old, but emacs is impressing me more and more. The learning curve for setting up some of these plugins is pretty high; does anyone have a tutorial so I can get this up and running?

<comment><USER6> Actually, _most_ plugins are easy. The problem is with plugins that need to interface with external programs--getting both Emacs and some program, like a browser, to cooperate can be tricky.

I don't think there can be a general tutorial for setting things like this up. The issues with this plugin are going to be due to your browser or JavaScript engine; the issues with a different plugin are going to be due to LaTeX or GHC or whatever program you're interfacing with. So the problems are probably going to be unique to each particular plugin rather than uniform across all plugins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can recommend Magnar's and Christian's emacs settings. All those fine tuned micro optimizations for emacs make you feel like a rock star programmer:

<https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d>

<comment><USER11> It's like an accelerated ride through emacs infos. Lots of straightforward valueable options. Thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I love these kinds of demos. REPLs are great... it makes me want to go back to using emacs.

</comment><comment><USER13> Oh man, definitely going to get this up-and-running tomorrow. This is awesome, potentially.

</comment><comment><USER14> This cool -- definitely digging into this tomorrow. I use swank-clojure every day, and it's incredibly productive to see real-time results as you type. I didn't know there was a swank-js. Is there by chance a swank-python out there somewhere?

<comment><USER15> I haven't tried it yet, but this "Emacs IPython Notebook" that was posted a few days ago looks similar, and their docs say that it's "like SLIME".

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4185960>

<http://tkf.github.com/emacs-ipython-notebook/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Awesome! Emacs was my first love and while we still hang out, it's not like it used to be. But this inspires me to make some time in my life for more. Also, I love the keyboard clicks. Sounds like a Das Keyboard, to me.

</comment><comment><USER17> Really glad someone is doing emacs screencasts. Awesome job magnars!

<comment><USER18> Many people are. I did a couple for my eredis project that let's you interact with Redis over an elisp repl or create/edit tables dynamically in a buffer from redis keys etc <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZP0MOaRueHU> <http://code.google.com/p/eredis/> disclaimer: I am not as cool as magnars

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> SuperCollider is exactly like this, but for sound synthesis: <http://supercollider.sourceforge.net/>

<comment><USER20> And there is an awesome Clojure interface for it called Overtone. <http://vimeo.com/22798433>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Has Bret Victor expected his amazing Inventing on Principle presentation would inspired so many of us? Me included, check my profile :)

</comment><comment><USER22> Now he needs to do a 4 hour step-by-step tutorial on how he set up Emacs to do this.

<comment><AUTHOR> The biggest problem for me was conflicting versions of SLIME.

Installing swank-js is a breeze with npm, but the installation instructions tell you to get the newest version of SLIME from their svn. That didn't work so well, since my clojure-swank already relied on an older version.

Simply installing slime-js from marmalade instead made all the difference.

As for my settings, they are public on github. [https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d/blob/master/setup- slime-...](https://github.com/magnars/.emacs.d/blob/master/setup-slime-js.el)

<comment><USER23> I have the same problem. So how does ELPA resolve conflicting SLIME versions?

<comment><AUTHOR> From what I can understand, it doesn't. Backwards compatability is usually good. However, there was a breaking change in 2011 sometime. The slime-js in marmalade relies on the SLIME in marmalade, which is from 2010.04.04 - <USER2> works with that. Same for clojure-swank. So by removing the newest SLIME, it worked for me.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Blood test 'can check for more than 50 types of cancer' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-52090359 <comment><AUTHOR> _More than 99% of positive results are accurate, the team says, but it will be crucial to check it does not miss cases and provide false assurance._

...

 _Trial data suggests it is better at detecting more advanced disease rather than the beginnings of cancer, which may limit how useful it becomes._</comment>


Twitter COO Dick Costolo Takes Over As CEO From Evan Williams - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/04/twitter-ceo-dick-costolo/ <comment><USER2> [http://www.quora.com/How-much-credibility-is-there-to-the- re...](http://www.quora.com/How-much-credibility-is-there-to-the-report-that- Dick-Costolo-is-being-groomed-to-take-over-as-Twitters-CEO)

<comment><USER3>
      Chris was referring to the "being groomed" part of this rumor as being dogshit.
      We all know Costolo has no hair with which to be groomed anyways.

Funny

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting tweet from the new CEO (a RT from @avibryant, <http://twitter.com/#!/dickc/status/3962807808>), likely to be a joke at the time (Sep 13, 2009): _First full day as Twitter COO tomorrow. Task #1: undermine CEO, consolidate power_

</comment><comment><USER5> This makes me admire Mark Zuckerberg more as he is heading such a big empire at such a small age! Facebook for sure had lot more challenges than Twitter for their Privacy issues and many new releases. Mark stood strong in all those incidents, and didn't give up. I remember his talk from StarupSchool, and how he was so supportive of Mark Picnus's advice on why founders need to be CEOs of their company.

<comment><USER6> Why the down votes here? It is pretty damn amazing that not only has Zuckerberg maintained control but he has also been smart enough to bring in talent to help him, personally, scale. It would have been easy for Mark to simply say, "Eh, I need to hire a CEO", or for him to listen to the countless investors and advisors that are almost certainly hinting to him that he should do so.

Why did Ev step down? No one really knows. It, almost certainly, is not because doing so will enable him to now focus on product. As CEO it is quite easy for him to delegate nearly all of those responsibilities he wishes to ignore to Dick. No, giving Dick the title of CEO almost undoubtably has beneath it many more subtle reasons, some of which might simply be that Ev convinced himself he needed to do this for personal reasons. We'll never know, but IMO the "so I can focus on XXX" reason is never the real reason.

<comment><USER5> Exactly, that was the point. Even Mark Zuckerberg primarily focuses on Product and Platform, whereas COO Sheryl Sandberg focuses on other Biz Dev things.

(From: <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/business/03face.html>)

"Ms. Sandberg has focused on building the business, expanding internationally, cultivating relationships with large advertisers and putting her polish on things like communications and public policy. That has freed Mr. Zuckerberg to focus on what he likes best: the Facebook Web site and its platform."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The tidbit I found most interesting was that Twitter claims 300 employees. That's at least twice the size I thought they were:

"In fact, there are 300 people working at Twitter today—compared to about 20 when I took the CEO job two years ago."

<comment><USER8> I wonder what the break down of technical/sales/etc. people is.

I was shocked, and I believe rightfully so, that digg even had 70+ employees. It just seems wasteful to me.

Then again I don't know what work they have to do behind the scenes.

<comment><USER9> Digg has 70+ employees? Interesting. Doesn't Reddit have less than 10? Someone please fact check that for me.

<comment><USER10> Reddit has 6. Digg has 60+.

<comment><USER11> Reddit was 4 until recently. They did say they felt like they couldn't really go forward anywhere with that kind of staff although. I don't know if the new 2 hires are enough.

<comment><USER12> _Reddit was 4 until recently... I don't know if the new 2 hires are enough._

Actually Reddit has been at least 5 for some time. The 2 "new hires" were announced retroactively.

<http://blog.reddit.com/2010/08/welcome-alex-and-lia.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yowza. This surprises me. I thought Ev was interested in running the company and building a legacy, but this looks more like a plan for a big exit.

<comment><USER14> I don't see how it foretells any plans to exit. Perhaps Ev just doesn't have the desire to be CEO of a 300+ person company. It's quite possible Costolo was hired as COO as a way of transitioning him into the CEO spot if he did well. That would certainly seem like a pretty smart strategy.

<comment><USER15> OTOH, Having 300+ people at some silly little micro blogging fad with very little revenue, doesn't seem like a pretty smart strategy.

<comment><USER15> So you downmodders think 300 employees is a reasonable number for a yet to be proved no business model startup? Wow.

<comment><USER16> Their quarterly revenue is, I believe, estimated somewhere in the region of $X million.

I suspect you got so many downvotes, though, because of the dismissive tone of your comment.

<comment><USER15> Their revenue is from 1, or at best 2 'customers', who could stop being 'customers' at the drop of a hat.

<comment><USER13> I believe your information is out of date. In addition to the two major data customers in Google and Microsoft (rumoured to be in the region of $25m/year) it also has advertisers who pay for promoted tweets and promoted hashtags. As for the "at the drop of a hat", of course they could, but why would they?

<comment><USER15> Once wave takes off of course!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> "profitable" was mentioned a few times in there. Would be interesting if this means a bigger focus on making money for Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER18> It's good this coincided with me ordering some care from the care factory. HP hiring a no-name for CEO was more interesting. These things don't impact hackers on a day to day. Let's float up the revenue sharing tidbit and discuss that.</comment>


Blizzard continues to innovate on the security front - <AUTHOR> http://rc3.org/2010/11/10/blizzard-continues-to-innovate-on-the-security-front/

<comment><USER2> As someone who has bank accounts in Europe (I am a foreign national working in the US) I can tell you that bank security in The Netherlands is standard two- factor authentication.

My "chip and pin" card contains the standard mag stripe along with an embedded microchip that can be used with chip transactions. Along with that i got an "e-Identifier" which is a stand alone device.

When I go to log into my bank I type in my account number (listed on my card), the card number (listed on the card) and then click next. On the screen will be a series of numbers that I then have to type into my eIdentifier.

So I slide my card into my eIdentifier and type in my pin number (what I have + what I know) and then type in the number presented to me, it then spits out another random number, I fill that in on the web form that the website provided to me. At that point I am logged into my banks website and I can look at my transaction history, and everything along those lines.

If at some point during that time I want to transfer money or do anything else that affects any part of my account I once again have to enter in my pin and go through the same steps as before to login on my eIdentifier.

This provides security for me. I never type a password into any part of the website, the codes are one time use only, and even if someone were to come to an open session and attempt to use it to transfer money in or out of the account they would be required to have my card, pin number, and an eIdentifier.

I'm a big fan of systems like that, it provides me with much more security than anything else, including "I wish it were two factor authentication" that American banks provide (look at this picture, now provide us a password).

What Blizzard is doing is considered standard security practice in Europe and other countries where banks are more stringently controlled and regulated and fraud is not taken lightly, and the only real new "innovation" if one may even call it that is that a online computer game is using this mechanism.

</comment><comment><USER3> "that explains why Blizzard finds it more worthwhile to implement robust authentication solutions when so many businesses that are susceptible to financial fraud do not."

It's quite simple, a wow player that gets hacked and loses his items will most probably quit if he doesn't get his items back. Getting items back means you need to talk to a Game Master, who must determine if you actually got hacked or if you're trying to scam the game by giving all your stuff to a friend, and then claiming you got hacked.

Having Game Masters employed costs a lot of money, and I guess the cheaper option is simply to improve account security rather than hiring hordes of GMs.

As for banks and similar, comitting fraud is an actual crime that results in jail-time if you get caught, which is a pretty huge disincentive in itself. Added to that, real money transactions are much more traceable so it's possible to find out where the money and went and who benefited.

Finally, a wow account costs $15 a month for everyone, I guess the average value per customer is much higher for wow players than bank customers?

<comment><USER4> _I guess the average value per customer is much higher for wow players than bank customers?_

No. Cost of customer acquisition for a _single credit card_ is roughly the same as WoW lifetime value (both in the vicinity of $250).

Lifetime value for a middle class bank customer depends on their product mix. On the low end, low three figures per year for a checking account which generates few fees. On the high end, well, suffice it to say middle class families are _very lucrative indeed_. (If you run $20k through your credit card a year, with an average balance in the $2k region, and you have a home loan and car loan, and... run some numbers for what your parents probably pay every year for banking services.)

<comment><USER5> "Bwahaahahaa. No."

Enriching a conversation with your knowledge would be enough, feeling the need to belittle as well could happily be left on slashdot.

<comment><USER4> My apologies, that was out of line.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I can't speak for all banks, but I'm with Barclays in the UK, and their system makes keyloggers a non-issue in a similar way. I can login to "basic online banking" using a few things from memory (surname, online ID number, debit card number, date of birth and password all required), but to actually do anything (like send money to another account) I need to authenticate using a chip+pin machine that they sent me free of charge. I insert my debit card, enter my PIN, then it gives me an 8 digit number that's time-sensitive. Frankly, this annoys me, why can't the reader connect via USB to save me typing in that number?

And I know at least one American bank has the same thing (possibly Bank of America?), as a friend of mine was the guy who pretty much created all of it.

<comment><USER7> At least two banks here in Greece use a similar system (it's essentially a two factor authentication variant).

Connecting it via USB would defeat the whole purpose of this second trusted information channel, between the OTP device and the bank's customer.

<comment><USER8> I think they all do, nowadays. The only reason I don't need a keyfob for my Alpha account is that when I opened it, 9 years ago, they didn't have keyfobs. Their password policy was retarded, though, it wouldn't accept a $ in the password. Of course, you can't do anything without the keyfob now other than view the balance and pay some bills, so it's okay.

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure Alpha still doesn't permit non-alphanumeric characters in passwords.

Go figure..

<comment><USER8> How people get paid to design systems like that, I'll never know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The black-market value of a WoW account is actually higher than a working credit card number, somewhere around $10, last I heard.

I still believe it is appalling that banks don't even do the bare minimum to protect accounts. My retirement account with all of my 401k money in it is only protected by a 6-digit NUMERIC PIN. This is ridiculous.

<comment><USER10> This is due, at least in part, to the fact that it's considerably easier to track down card thieves, whereas Blizzard is largely focused just on getting the accounts back in working order for their customers (and, as mentioned in this article, preventing them from being stolen in the first place).

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If I had to guess here, I'd wager that the people in banks and similar financial services organizations responsible for making the decisions are very insulated from the effects of fraud compared to the equivalent people at Blizzard.

Every time an account gets stolen, it's pretty likely Blizzard is going to hear about it, either through a GM complaint or a call to customer service or a chargeback, and all of those impact their bottom line (one way or another). Stolen accounts are typically used for further fraud, either for real-money transactions or for spamming other players, so it has a ripple effect on the rest of the customer base. As a result it has to be hard for _all_ the decisionmakers at Blizzard to look at customer complaints about stolen accounts and think 'well, that's not my problem', even if they'd rather be working on other things. The impact is also more 'real' because Blizzard employees are going to feel it when they play the game themselves, either through hearing about a friend losing an account or seeing spam in local chat.

On the other hand, if you're working as a mid-level manager at a bank and you don't have any control over fraud controls or the technology used to build your online banking software, I have to imagine it's pretty easy to think 'not my problem' when faced with customer complaints about fraud.

My experience at a different MMO developer was that while we internally had very stringent security practices and did a lot of work to help customers who lost their accounts, our parent company/publisher wasn't nearly as serious about security, and it seemed like the same effect was at work there.

</comment><comment><USER12> This could be considered innovative, if they hadn't done it wrong. Problem: It can't be used in conjunction with with fob- or phone-based authenticators. It's a step _backwards_. Now, rather then using two-factor authentication every time you log in, users using this method will _only_ be verified when Blizzard deems it suspicious. Account being stolen from an IP in China? Blocked. Account being stolen from an IP in Canada? Have a nice day!

</comment><comment><USER13> Can anyone briefly explain to me how a Blizzard authenticator works? I'd like to implement something like that for fun, but apparently my google-fu is weak. A link would also be good.

[If anyone cares, I bought some model rocket motors and a TI Launchpad, I have a modem and a landline... Dialing in a launch and requiring the use of an autheticator to do so sounds like great fun. My own pretend nukes.]

<comment><USER14> <http://bnetauth.freeportal.us/specification.html>

<http://seclists.org/bugtraq/2010/Sep/160>

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The other day I logged into my WoW account at an unusual hour from an IP in an EU country I usually always logged in from and was greeted with my account being locked down for suspicious activities.

As far as banks are concerened, some are offering TANs to mobile phone text messages which I think is pretty awesome.</comment>


Google Answers - <AUTHOR> http://answers.google.com/answers/index.html <comment><USER2> Farewell little one we hardly knew ye.</comment>


Sign of the Times - WhoCanISue.com - <AUTHOR> http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1202434473795&src=EMC-Email&et=editorial&bu=Law.com&pt=Law.com%20Newswire%20Update&cn=LAWCOM_NewswireUpdate_20091012&kw=%27Whocanisue.com%27%20Aggressively%20Seeks%20Plaintiffs

<comment><USER2> WhoCanISue.com's profitability is another data point in favor of the hypothesis that there are corruption problems in the justice system. The obvious example is the well-known correlation between having deeper pockets and winning in court.

We shouldn't be "mad" at this business, they are just exploiting an already- exploitable system.

</comment><comment><USER3> of course this is advertised all around Miami. I wish this city would stop re- enforcing its sleazy stereotype.

<comment><USER4> I came here to make the same comment. I've seen their billboards everywhere. My wife (who is a lawyer) thinks it pushes ethical boundaries, but that there is technically/legally nothing wrong with what they are doing (based on just skimming their info).

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> There's been some noises from from the Florida Bar Association (or at least it's vice-president). They're concerned about the ethics of 'directly appealing to people who want to be litigious': [http://www.sun- sentinel.com/news/palm-beach/boca-raton/sfl-w...](http://www.sun- sentinel.com/news/palm-beach/boca-raton/sfl-who-can-i- sue-p100409,0,4368025.story)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is something that I would expect to see on The Onion</comment>


Quantifying Eventual Consistency via Probabilistically Bounded Staleness (PBS) - <AUTHOR> http://databeta.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/pbs-quantifying-eventual-consistency-of-replicas/

<comment><AUTHOR> UCB Project page is here - <http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pbailis/projects/pbs/>

A technical report on their findings here - [http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2012/EECS-2012-4....](http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2012/EECS-2012-4.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: I have 150 USD in savings. How to to get a "proper" visa to the US? - <AUTHOR> I thought about E-2 Investor Visa and opening a company in the US. Does anyone has experience with this? <comment><USER2> I had a management visa linked to opening a company in the US in 2010. It sucked, because the company was so successful we sold it (for a nice profit), then I became aware that the US basically treated me as an illegal immigrant 10 days after my job finished. This is normal there - you have no stability in the US as an immigrant worker unless you go the green card route, which was never something I wanted to do personally (as an AU/DE/NZ citizen).

My first question would be _why_ do you want to go to the US as this is a more important question for figuring out an appropriate strategy.

IMHO, honestly there's not much point in going to the US these days. You can get superior access to capital in China, superior access to far cheaper western education in Australia, New Zealand or Europe, and equivalent earning potential jobs in Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the UK.

<comment><USER3> Not sure about the other places, but there's no comparison in tech salaries between the US and UK. The UK greatly undervalues it's technical talent.

(source: [http://www.itworld.com/article/2947616/careers/developers- ma...](http://www.itworld.com/article/2947616/careers/developers-make-a-lot- more-in-the-us-than-in-the-uk.html))

<comment><USER2> Not really... I made marginally more in the US than UK but it wasn't a great deal. That said, I had a good gig in the UK. Worst case, it's not order-of- magnitude different, and besides: proximity to Europe and a culture of realistic holidaying makes up for it (and ... cheeky as it may be to say it ... co-working with people from around the world wins hands down on being stuck in an office 355 days a year with Americans).

<comment><USER4> You have to work on most weekends and don't get any vacation days?

<comment><USER2> In the US, 10 days/year is standard. Everywhere else is way more, save perhaps Japan.

<comment><USER4> I'm in the US, we usually get weekends off as well, which comprise of almost ten days off in a month, let alone a year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there a typo ? Did you mean 150 USD or 150 K/M USD ? 150 USD won't even buy a regular visa.

</comment><comment><USER3> Guessing you mean 150k. I came to the US on an E-2. The process is extremely poorly documented and arbitrary - the decision is at the discretion of the immigration clerk who reads your file on that day and the laws don't mention any specific dollar amounts that are required. 150k is likely enough to get you in. However, do your research and ask if that's really what you want to do.

You are supposed to come over, invest your money, then leave the country and wait for a decision (?!). However you can come over on a B-1 (business) visa and change status to an E-2, but then you're landlocked and unable to leave the US without losing your status and having to re-apply.

You have to renew every 3-5 years (again the duration is discretionary) and if you're denied you have a matter of days to sell up and get out.

There is NO route to a green card or citizenship. You are a non-immigrant alien. Every 3-5 years you have to hope you get renewed. You can be here for decades and if your renewal doesn't go through, out you go.

The E-2 is a very poor visa program to come in on if you plan to build a life here. If you don't really, really want to 1) invest everything you have in a business and 2) do it in the US and 3) leave again once you're done, it's not ideal.

Alternative routes I'd recommend looking into as a single individual with tech experience are:

1) Get a job with a US company who will sponsor your visa to come over on an H1-B, or, if you're a published expert in your field, an O-1. You don't have to be as famous/expert as you think - I have friends on O visas who are Senior tech people who have a few conference talks and published articles under their belt who have qualified. Both have a route to green card/permanent residency.

2) Get a job with a multinational company who can transfer you under the above visas. With companies look for larger orgs with in-house counsel who regularly handle immigration matters. Small companies are not well equipped to handle sponsorship and the delays/expenses may cause them to get cold feet at inconvenient times.

3) Fall in love with a nice American and get married.

Feel free to PM me if you have any questions! Happy to share my experience. (Above isn't legal advice and is based on my own experience so may be wrong - talk to a US immigration attorney with E-2 experience if you are serious!)

</comment><comment><USER6> What country are you coming from? You have to be on the treaty list.

I don't think the savings are enough, but it depends on the type of business/where you will be located. If that is the extent of your savings you have to consider living expenses/relocation in addition to the amount you will put into the business as an investment.

I would also look into consulting with a laywer that has experience in this field.

</comment><comment><USER7> Do you mean $150k USD?</comment>


Are we in a cryptocurrency bubble? A comparison with the 2000 dotcom bubble - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@zemacedo/are-we-in-a-cryptocurrency-bubble-a-comparison-with-the-2000-dotcom-bubble-a463d8dd8d8b <comment><USER2> As someone standing on the outside, the massive boom in value certainly sounds like a bubble to me. I'm hearing all the same stories: the newly rich buying absurd cars, "my friend made x much". Eventually all the tourists who want on will get on, then they'll start gettin back off.

</comment><comment><USER3> The speculation about cryptocurrency valuations is a great example of how bad people are at dealing with radical novelties. People spout meaningless analogies, be they about decades old market crashes or centuries old speculative frenzies like tulip bulbs, as if they apply here when clearly they cannot.

<comment><AUTHOR> Appreciate the feedback!

Is there any example from history you think could be used as an analogy or do you think there's no way of comparing this to anything that's happened before? If so, how do you think about cryptocurrency valuation?

<comment><USER4> This is the first time we've had a bubble around an asset with zero intrinsic value. Even tulips, or "worthless" Weimar Republic bills had negligible value.

When Bitcoin implodes the value of your Bitcoin collectable merchandise will vastly exceed the value of your BTC. Those physical coins will slowly increase over time as their obscurity and notoriety grows.

<comment><AUTHOR> I hear this argument a lot and I'm never really sure what is meant by "intrinsic value"? Why do you think bitcoins have zero intrinsic value but tulips and weimar republic bills do?

Bitcoin has many uses, but for the sake of argument let's take its often stated use of acting as digital gold. If gold is "intrinsically valuable" which I presume you think it is, then so is bitcoin. Gold is valuable because it is a good store of value due to its properties of being scarce, long- lasting, easily divisible, transportable, etc. Bitcoin is all these things too and in fact is a much better store of value than gold. I see no reason, other than "brand", why gold should be "intrinsically valuable" but bitcoin not. Btw, gold is a 3-6trillion dollar market depending on how you do the accounting ([https://schiffgold.com/commentaries/just-how-big-is-the- gold...](https://schiffgold.com/commentaries/just-how-big-is-the-gold- market/)).

<comment><USER3> Good luck transacting in gold, because it can't be done efficiently due to assaying costs. You can transact in metal bars stamped by Credit Suisse or another bank, or coins minted by some sovereign or other trusted authority, but nobody in their right mind is going to accept plain gold for any transaction. Without the imprimatur of some authority, it's simply not trustworthy.

<comment><USER4> When Argentina's economy collapsed people would frequently transact in gold. It wasn't bars, but just junk gold, something that a simple chemical test could prove was gold if necessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bitcoin chart is a fractal. Every single time in the history of it there is a post about it being a bubble. $100, $1000, $3K, $4K, $10K, I keep seeing this for yyyyears.

<comment><USER4> There's a limit to how stratospheric this price will go because at some point it will blow out so hard it poisons the whole Bitcoin economy.

If it doesn't happen before $100K I'd be truly astonished. The longer this goes on, the higher it goes, the harder and faster it will crash. A lot of people are going to be caught holding _nothing_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Allow me to save you sometime, the author basically sums it up with this:

        Conclusion: It's obviously a simplified model and you can play around with the numbers and get marginally different results, but the key insight is that even if you're a fervent crypto believer, if you think there is a nonzero chance a crash might happen then in order to maximize your EV (i.e. make the most money) you should keep some % of your money on the sidelines to invest once the bubble pops and lower your average buy-in cost. The higher the probability you assign to a crash, the more money you should keep on the sidelines and vice versa

<comment><USER7> Sorry, trying to read this was so painful and time wasting on mobile.

For anyone else not interested in scrolling:

Conclusion: It's obviously a simplified model and you can play around with the numbers and get marginally different results, but the key insight is that even if you're a fervent crypto believer, if you think there is a nonzero chance a crash might happen then in order to maximize your EV (i.e. make the most money) you should keep some % of your money on the sidelines to invest once the bubble pops and lower your average buy-in cost. The higher the probability you assign to a crash, the more money you should keep on the sidelines and vice versa</comment></comment>


New tool helps debug Java exceptions faster - <AUTHOR> http://www.excepterror.com

<comment><USER2> If you are using Java with a package/build manager like maven you can always automatically pull all the source jars and then any IDE (Intellij/Eclipse) will allow you to jump through all third party libraries. Are you targeting the non-IDE crowd with this tool?

<comment><AUTHOR> The main use-case that I see for this is when an exception is thrown in production on some random server inside a third party library. Such exceptions can be excruciatingly hard to run down without the source code.

<comment><USER3> While useful, I can't see how it could ensure that the right version of the source code is being presented to the user.

In theory, it could analyse all versions of a library, and then choose only those versions that could lead to the given stack trace. Even that would be error prone, and may lead to multiple results.

Setting up an IDE would take extra time, but would be the best way to debug the exception.

<comment><AUTHOR> Finding the right version of the source code is definitely a challenge. However, it's a solvable one. What you're suggesting is actually what ExceptError does. It indexes all versions of each library, and uses context from the entire stack-trace, including line-numbers, method-names, etc, to find the exact match.

Agree that IDE is the best way, especially when it comes to Java, but it's not always possible. For example you may be debugging distributed systems in production.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I wrote one of these back in 2000. We had a huge WebLogic app with 10s if not more developers rotate in and out of it over many months. So I wrote a tool that did an n-gram search over the codebase and hyper link all of the lines in an exception trace to those files on viewcvs (now viewcv). Paste in a stack trace and immediately start navigating the source repo. I would have like to have made exception capture automatically submit it to the site so we could measure exception popularity.

Edit: the ngram part was so that you could paste in random snippets of code and get hits in the version control store to start navigating. It was strictly needed for the exception hyperlinking.

</comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of [http://www.grepcode.com/](http://www.grepcode.com/), which I used a lot before I had an environment that auto-downloaded source.

I really like that grepcode lets you see which version and what repository matches what you searched. It can make finding why something doesn't work in a particular released version of a library much easier.

</comment><comment><USER6> How do you handle multiple versions of the same jar files? Line numbers could be easily different across multiple versions.

I have three suggestions:

1) each stack frame has method name. That could be used to filter out obvious errors.

2) provide selection between multiple versions if there are more options

3) let me upload POM, parse classpath or something.

</comment><comment><USER7> Which IDE is it integrated with, cool feature but not a game changer.

<comment><AUTHOR> It doesn't integrate with any IDE right now. As @arturnt noted, debugging and jumping to the right source code is generally not a problem when you're inside an IDE.

<comment><USER8> Even when the error happens on the server and you're not inside an IDE, most of them (I'm sure Netbeans does it) allow you to paste the stacktrace from the production logs and makes classes/lines clickable, so you can enter the source code at the right points.

It's more or less what your tool does on the web.

Your tool may still be useful if some arcane third party app crashes, but how would you track the proper source code without info on dependencies' versions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Really helpful when debugging some random server!

My bits: \- Might want to mention the title of the file it is displaying. \- What does "versions" do?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Good point, I'll look into adding that.

"versions" tells you all the software versions which match, based on the context derived from the exception. For example, if you're unsure what version of Hadoop you're running, it'll tell you.</comment></comment>